How to Become an SEO Freelancer in 48 Hours

The first real business I had online was working as an SEO freelancer. This was a few years ago, and obviously in the last 5 years search engine optimization has changed a lot.

This post was originally published in 2011, but it’s been updated as of November 2016, because let’s face it, we all hate finding the perfect resource only to find out that it’s incredibly outdated.

How to Become an SEO Freelancer in 48 Hours

So is it really possible to become an SEO freelancer in 48 hours?

Well, yes and no.

Here’s the thing about SEO…

The only way to actually get good at it, is to dig in and practice on your own sites.

You can read all of the books in the world, but until you try it out on your own sites and test yourself, you’ll never truly be able to have the confidence to be an SEO freelancer.

So the goal of this post is to give you all the resources you need to get started.

I suggest you take a weekend, review all of the resources and strategies mentioned, and get started.

If you take this seriously, within a few months you’ll be able to start seeing what works and what doesn’t and truly be able to start making a living doing freelance search engine optimization work.

So are you ready to jump into this, and start the process to becoming an SEO freelancer (or simply become more knowledgable so you can apply the concepts to your own website)?

What is SEO?

For those of you who don’t know what SEO means, it stands for Search Engine Optimization.

SEO is is the process of optimizing your website to rank as highly as possible in search engines for keywords that are related to the content on your website.

Google is by far the most used and important search engine to focus on for SEO purposes.

One of the mistakes people make when they’re looking to start a business is they think they have to know everything there is to know on a subject.

This is false.

You just have to know more than the person paying you to do the work.

I’ll never know every single intricacy of search engine optimization (in fact, no one will), but I know enough to add a lot of value to businesses or individuals.

There are a lot of skills out there that you can become proficient in very quickly if you:

Spend the time to learn the techniques.

Have the resources necessary to get you there. This is the case with just about every single computer related job out there.

You don’t need special training or fancy degrees. You just have to be willing to learn, able put in the hours to learn the basics, and not be afraid to ask for help from time to time.

Note: I want to make this very clear up front. You can Google the answer to just about every SEO problem out there. Don’t forget this.

SEO Basics

So we’ve got 48 hours to get you to the point where you’ve got the skills necessary to do basic SEO related tasks on a freelance basis.

First things first, what exactly are we trying to accomplish and what are the components involved?

As mentioned earlier, the overarching goal is to rank your client’s (or your own) websites as highly as possible in Google for specific key terms.

Let’s look at everything that goes into a successful SEO campaign:

Keyword Research. This is the process of sorting out the good key terms the bad. You may rank first for “the best freaking blog in the whole entire world” but if no one is searching for that – it means nothing. At the same time, you don’t want to try and rank for the term “blog” because you’ll never succeed – there’s too much competition. In the keyword research phase of the process you figure out which key words have the best combination of attainability and sufficient traffic, allowing you to see positive results

Competitive Analysis. This is one of the most important components when you’re doing work for a company who has pretty strong competition. By looking at your competitor’s websites you’ll get ideas for key terms, understand the strengths and weaknesses of their site, and be able to capitalize on the things they aren’t doing so well.

On-Site Analysis. Essentially there are two major types of SEO: on site and off site. On site is everything that you can control on your site. This can include things like page titles, optimized sitemap, meta data, content, optimized photos etc. Off site is everything you can’t control. The primary aspect of this is incoming links from other sites. Links are the currency of the internet, and we’ll expand more on that topic later on. By reviewing and making changes to all of the things you do have control of on your own site, you’ll be making big progress towards favorable rankings, more traffic, and in turn, more revenue.

Link Building. Let’s break this down in the most simple blanket statement possible: more links = better rankings. The higher the quality of links (meaning links from large and relavent sites) you can obtain, the more likely you’re rankings will improve.

One thing to take note of, is you don’t have to be an expert at all of these things. There are people who specialize in link building or keyword research. You won’t be able to make as much money from each client, simply because there is less work to be done, but becoming an expert in one of these fields could be a less daunting route to take in the beginning.

However regardless of the route you take, you still need to understand the basics of each SEO discipline and how they all work together.

Here are four of the most important free resources that you should read in depth as it relates to SEO basics. Seriously, go grab a beer or a coffee or whatever will keep you awake, and read these posts. If you don’t have time now, make sure you bookmark this and come back to it later:

Moz Beginners Guide to SEO: This free course covers a lot of the theory behind SEO and will help you to understand they hows and whys of the field.

WebConfs SEO Tutorial: This one expands into some of the individual SEO disciplines a lot more than the Moz guide, and is one of the best overviews that I’ve gone through.

Search Engine Land’s Guide To SEO: This is a multi-part series from Search Engine Land’s Guide. It’s 9 detailed blog posts about different aspects of SEO – don’t miss this one.

SEO Book SEO Glossary: SEO Book is one the leading resources on the internet, and this is a really in depth glossary. It’s worth reviewing for key terms, and book marking for easy access later on.

Source Wave – Be prepared to be sold things around every corner on this site, but frankly, his free SEO content is really solid. So it’s worth spending some time reading it and watching some of his videos.

SEO Competitor Analysis

By now you should have a good general sense of what SEO is all about. You may have even picked up a little knowledge about some specific aspects of SEO like competitor analysis and keyword research.

When I’m getting started I tend to do my competitor analysis and keyword research a bit hand in hand. That said, make sure you have a broad sense of the market before diving right in – thus the benefit of checking out your competitor’s websites. You are going to get a few benefits from doing this:

Seed Keywords: By looking at other similar sites you’ll discover potential keywords to target that you may have missed otherwise.

Level of competency: Some companies have spent thousands of dollars optimizing their websites. Others didn’t even know you could. By understanding the level of SEO competency your competitors have, you’ll have a more clear idea of the job that’s in front of you.

Weaknesses: One of the most successful campaigns I’ve run has been due to learning from my competitor’s weaknesses. They had a few good key terms I hadn’t come across, but did an awful job implementing them – right down to misspelling the words! Word of advice – don’t do that. It wasn’t hard to knock them out of the top spot for a few long-tail key terms.

So now that you understand the basics of why, let’s look at the how.

5 Steps for SEO Competitive Analysis & Research: This post gives you a general overview of some of the components involved in looking at your competitors. It also has links to a few good resources on the subject, so spend some time reviewing.

Raven Tools Competitor Analysis Checklist: Raven posted this checklist to market their other optimization tools, but the fact remains this is a really useful checklist to get started with. If you use this and create a spreadsheet analyzing your 3-5 biggest competitors, you’re going to be way ahead of the game when implementing the rest of your process.

SEO Keyword Research

This is arguably the most important part of a good SEO campaign. The bottom line is that if you select keywords with too little traffic, you’ll have wasted a lot of time optimizing, and see little in the way of results.

On the other hand, if you choose keywords that are too competitive you’ll spend way too much time trying to achieve high rankings, and you may or may not ever get there.

So how do you come up with high quality keywords?

The very first thing I do when I’m analyzing a site is check the Google Analytics for “seed keywords.”

By looking at the keywords that people are already using to find the site, you’ll have a great idea of where to start. There are literally millions if not billions of keywords out there.

Over the last few years Google has started giving you significantly less data on this, but you should still have enough to get a sense of what some of your highest traffic keywords are.

For instance, “HDR Photo” is going to bring a whole different set of results than “HDR photos.” So when beginning your research you want to be as thorough as possible.

Here are some of the best tools for come up with your initial keyword list:

Google Keyword Planner: This is the de-facto free keyword tool out there. When I need a free solution for keyword research, this is the first place I go and where I recommend you go as well.

Bing Keyword Research Tool: This is Bing’s Keyword Research website, and there are actually a few pretty useful resources on this site. Definitely take a look around and get familiar with what’s offered here.

Wordtracker Keyword Suggestion Tool: Like a lot of SEO Tools out there, Wordtracker has a lot of premium tools available for a lot of money. However, this is a useful tool nonetheless, and signing up for a free trial will give you access to their basic tools for no cost.

Moz Pro – I used to use standalone tools like Market Samurai and Long Tail Pro for my keyword research. However I’ve found using Moz Pro to be a much better experience. It makes it easier to find new keywords, and track the ones that are most crucial to my success. There’s a monthly fee associated with it, but they do give you limited access for free which an get you started.

Sweet, now you’ve got an arsenal of tools, but they won’t do you a whole lot of good if you don’t know how to use them.

We have our own guide inside Location Rebel Arsenal, but here are a few resources that will help get you started with keyword research essentials.

Keyword Research: The Definitive Guide: Brian Dean from Backlinko has an amazing in depth guide that covers everything you need to know about keyword research. You do not want to miss this one, so spend some time reviewing.

Market Samurai Dojo: Whether you buy Samurai or not, this keyword research tutorial is awesome. It helps you understand various niches and markets, and their 4 golden rules still form the basis to much of my keyword research. Highly recommended.

Make Your First $100 online in 45 Minutes: This is an extremely in depth guide that focuses on SEO for affiliate marketing. I think it can be a little intense for beginners, but there’s some fantastic info in there. I’m including it now because I think the keyword research section is particularly useful for what we’re talking about here.

If you take a look at these three tutorials and practice the techniques, you should have all the information necessary to start successfully researching your own keywords.

A few things that I’ve done to see a lot of success on my photography blog are to target a different long tail key term on each post I do.

I take HDR photos from all over the world, and HDR is definitely a niche. So I can easily rank higher for “Honduras HDR” than I could “Honduras Photos.” By doing that, I’ve been able to rank #1 for dozens of HDR related key terms that individually get limited traffic, but when you add them up, send me dozens of hits a day.

By ensuring you optimize images on your site with key terms, alt tags, and meta data, you can get increased traffic from Google and Bing Image search as well. For a bit more on images, Yoast has a great post up that shows you how to optimize your images for SEO, check it out.

On Site Optimization

If you haven’t been able to tell already, a successful SEO campaign doesn’t rely on any one aspect of the process. Each piece plays an integral part to your overall results. That said, you could have done the best keyword research job ever, but if your site isn’t at least somewhat optimized – you’re screwed.

There are a ton of aspects that go into successful site optimization, but to get started and get you up to speed with what you should be looking for.

Take a look at this:

WebConfs 15 Minute SEO Check: This is a fantastic checklist for your on site optimization, and how I get started with most of my projects. It tells you exactly what you need to look for as well as tells you the importance of each site component. WebConfs also has a variety of other useful tools that can be found here.

SEO Workers Site Analysis: There are a lot of SEO site analysis tools out there, and most of them aren’t that great. I like this one because not only does it do some basic analysis of your site – but it tells you whats good and whats bad. When you’re just starting out, you’ll need all the help you can get when trying to figure out what you should really be focused on. Running this before doing the previous 15 minute SEO check could a good move.

Moz SEO Tools: Moz and SEO Book are the two biggest SEO sites out there. They each have an incredible amount of good information, expensive premium membership fees, and great free/premium tools. There’s absolutely no reason you shouldn’t be signing up for a basic Moz account to get access to their free tools.

SEO Book Tools: SEO Book has everything mentioned above, but it has a special deal for subscribers. It offers three premium Firefox plugins: SEO Toolbar, SEO for Firefox and Rank Tracker (try this tool if you’re on Chrome). I’ve found SEO for Firefox to be the most useful as it includes great SEO information right in the search results. I also used Rank Tracker for awhile before I started using the rank tracking features in Moz Pro.

If you’re going to be successful as a freelancer or with any of your personal sites, you should get really familiar with these techniques and start putting them into use on your own site right now.

The best way to get started is to take all of your starting keywords and run your site through rank tracker. Make a spreadsheet of the results and rerun them once a week so that you can see your progress.

Start by optimizing all of the “+3” items on the 15 Minute SEO Check. Track your changes and see how your rankings change in the next 2 weeks.

It’s totally possible to learn the basic skills needed in order to do SEO freelance work in a weekend, however if you’re really going to be successful with it as a business you’ll need to be able to prove you know what your doing.

So think of your personal site as your SEO resume. The higher your rank for main key terms, the better the chances of you finding work!

Link Building for SEO

Link building is something that you need to tread very carefully with.

To grossly oversimplify things the basic premise of SEO hasn’t changed in years: the more links you have pointing to your website, the better your rankings will be.

There are lots of ways to get links, however, and not all links are created equal.

This is where a lot of people have run into problems over the last years. They’ve tried to game the system, and done some potentially shady things that have led to Google penalizing their site, and thus killing their rankings.

I always advocate white hat ways of linking building, and still think guest posting is one of the absolute best ways to build high quality links and send traffic to your site (see more on this below).

That said, if want to form the basis of a solid link building campaign, here’s where I would start:

Link Building: The Definitive Guide: Once again Brian Dean of Backlinko has an awesome guide at the ready. If you’re starting to get the feeling that he knows his stuff, you aren’t mistaken. This takes you through nine chapters full of actionable advice and case studies. Don’t miss this one.

The Bootstrapper’s Guide to Link Building – This is one of the most honest accounts I’ve seen on how to start building links in a way that isn’t super spammy. Travis is one of the best SEOs I know, so I always place high value on his advice.

SEO Moz Beginners Guide to SEO: This book covers a lot of the theory behind SEO and will help you to understand they hows and whys of the field. If you head to Chapter 7, you’ll find all sorts of tips and advice on how to get started with backlinking.

There are a couple of other major ways to focus in on building links too, so keep reading.

Social Sites

Don’t forget you can tap into sites like Quora, Reddit, Hacker News, and Inbound.org all as places to build up links as well. Of course, the key here is to not just jump in and spam everyone with your links, that’s a fast track to getting kicked out.

This is more of a long term strategy, you want to build up a bit of influence in these communities by sharing information, helping others, and posting frequently. Then you can start dropping you content in these sites as content that is going to help educate and provide value.

The same goes for your social media like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. If you’ve got a daily or weekly vlog that you show on YouTube, be sure to rank your videos for SEO as well, these can all lead back to your main site.

Guest Posting

If you’re a blogger this one is a no brainer. But even if you have a more traditional website, and are an expert in your industry, guest posting/writing for other websites can be a good way to get high quality, relevant back links back to your site.

You can (and should) not only guest post on relevant blogs in your industry, but also look for complementary blogs, and find any major sites who will accept your posts as well. If you aren’t sure what sites to target, use a tool like AllTop find your niche or keywords and then check out the blogs that are listed (you can also submit your own blog there).

Free blogs

For example, if I was targeting “Honduras HDR” – I’d register hondurashdr.blogger.com – and I’d spend an hour or two building a blog around the keyword.

I’d then add high quality blog posts and content to these resources, with links pointing back to your site. This can border on spammy, so you want to make sure if you go this route you actually take a little bit of time to create content that is actually useful for someone who lands on these sites.

A Few More SEO Strategies, Tips, and Tools

Now that you understand some of the basic strategies to successful link building, how about a couple tools and strategies that have worked extremely well for me:

HARO: This has been a great tool to get not only links on really high quality sites, but tons of free publicity and traffic as well. You should absolutely sign up for HARO and start submitting ASAP, if you want more info read a HARO case study here.

WordPress SEO – I have a ton of respect for what Glen has done over at Viper Chill and this post is an incredible guide for people doing SEO on WordPress sites (which if you’re reading this, is probably you).

How to Create a Website to Practice Your SEO Skills

So all of these resources are great, but if you don’t have a website of your own that you can actually practice this stuff with, it’s not going to do you any good.

The good news is that it’s easy to get started and you can have your website up and running in just a few hours.

Install WordPress and Do Basic Blog Setup. This isn’t as daunting as it might sound, and I walk you through every single step for how to do it in this step by step guide.

Optimize Your Site for Visitors. You want to make sure everything looks good, and doesn’t make people run away as soon as they land on your site. This blog audit will help with that.

Optimize Your Site for Search Engines. Now it’s time to use your new site to start practicing and testing! Start with the “on site SEO resources” listed in this post above.

Now that wasn’t so hard now was it?

Finding SEO Work

Ok, so once you’ve built your SEO skills, and feel confident with your results, how do you go about marketing your skills to the rest of the world?

Good question, but the best advice I have in the beginning is to read this article: How to Get More Clients on Upwork. Is Upwork the only way to get SEO clients? No. Is it even the best? Probably not.

But this post does a good job of making you think about some of the most important aspects of figuring out your branding and offer.

So what are you waiting for?

If you’ve been looking for a location independent business now is your chance to get started. Looking to get into another industry and don’t know how? Let me know what it is, and we’ll find you some answers.

Wow, Sean! What a monster post. So much stuff here . . . I’m just starting to explore the world of niche sites and can’t wait to go through everything you’ve got here piece-by-piece. Thanks for making all of this available!

Hey nice post. I’d recommend Article Marketing Robot as well as UAW, does pretty much the same thing but for a 1 off cost. Also TextBrokers for cheap unique articles and then The Best Spinner to spin them. Also link to your links, make the 1st run of articles on HQ sites and then on the rubbish sites link to the HQ articles.

With your Honduras example what are you doing there? Do you make this and then try to rank that site or use that as a spoke in some sort of link wheel? We do this to make spokes to keyworded domains as we can control the domains and don’t have to worry about a trigger happy admin from WordPress deleting a site – this has happened to me.

I’d say SEO + virtual assistants + some tools make SEO a very nice business to run, most clients pay monthly and just 4 can help you make a fortune per month. This is before working on your own affiliate and lead gen sites.

What a great resource you’ve put together here Sean. These are the kinds of SEO questions I have been wanting to answer and learn more about for some time so I thank you for putting it all together in one place.

Market Samauri is the shit. The best part is that most people only know how to use the keyword and competition tabs. The content, domain and paid parts of the tool are where the truly long tail money is.

Anyway, this was good dude, awesome resources. Only things I would add is to look closely at 2 things: local and social. Our videos rankings kill it in both Google and YouTube and local marketing is becoming a necessity, especially as a consultant (which I’m not, we do everything for our own in house projects).

Looking forward to see where you take this bro. It seems like a lot of the lifestyle bloggers in our niche are shifting focus this year on building more long-term sustainable businesses instead of the travel for a year and then what style. I’m down like Nino Brown to see it all come together.

I’m a little bit obsessed with SEO. Ok, maybe more than a little bit. I love building links for my business. I could definitely see myself doing the freelance thing in the future.

One thing I will say is that thinking too much about SEO and link quality and all that shit will just slow you down. SEO blogs like SEOmoz are great, but I find they usually just scare me. They over-analyze every little detail so much that it’s overwhelming and I feel like it’s hard to get moving sometimes.

What I’ve done is just pick a couple of strategies that work and stick to them, the results have been pretty great so far.

My recommended resouce: The Best Spinner. I use it all the time for creating great unique articles.

One thing to make really clear, as a few people have asked about it, is that SEO is not synonymous with affiliate marketing. Sure, for many affilate marketers SEO is a huge part of their strategy, but a person who is freelancing in this business generally will be working for clients who are anywhere from a small local business to fortune 500 companies.

Ryan, to answer your question, the going rates vary wildly, mostly due to skill and reputation. Entry level for basic tasks I’d say is in the $25-30/hour range. This can get turn into hundreds of dollars an hour for the really elite guys. It’s very much a case by case basis for me. I’ll also cover some of those details further in a future post.

Nate, I’ve also heard a lot of good things about The Best Spinner. I use a program as well called Jet Submitter, which isn’t the absolute best, but you can get a basic account for free which is nice.

Thanks everyone for all the positive feedback, if you have anything else you want to know on the topic I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Sean, great pillar article! You brought a ton of valueable information without getting bogged down in too much nitty gritty. I have a feeling this is the beginnging of many more valueable resources you have to offer. Keep it up, Sean!

It is a good article but I will add to the bit when you said you can google for every answer. Make sure that the answer is right, I came across a blog post a while ago recommending using Stumble Upon for traffic and it was completely wrong. It even went against what Stumble Upon tells you in their small print, not to do if you don’t want them to compare you to a spammer.

I’m very interested in this topic as I have recently launched a content-based website (“blog”) and have been doing lots of reading on the subject.

Since I’m new to this, love DIY projects, and just am getting back into the world of “work” (I’m a mom) after a long break, I’ve been reading up on these topics. Two books that were really helpful to me:
“How to Say It: Marketing with the New Media” by Lena Claxton and “Million Dollar Website: Simple steps to help you compete” by Lori Culwell.

Wow! This is great stuff, Sean! I love the clear steps you are providing here along with all this info and other content you’ve linked to. I’m looking forward to your own SEO guide in the coming months!

The only problem with assessing keywords based on Keyword Tool data is that it doesn’t really tell you much about what converts. SEO is a long term thing and building out a site based on high-traffic keywords only to find they’re worthless commercially is never fun.

What you can do is run a campaign on Adwords for the terms you’re trying to target organically, so that you learn what’s worth targeting and what should be filtered out. This way you get accurate monthly search numbers from your ad’s impressions (which the Google Keyword Tool and MS won’t give you since their data is really inaccurate) and data on what keywords actually convert into sales/sign ups/opt-ins or whatever you want.

You’ve gotta drop $500 or so up front to learn what works and what doesn’t, but it’s going to save hours that would otherwise be wasted on bad keywords later. If your site is good you’ll probably break even on the paid traffic anyway, which means free data.

thanks for this man. I have some problem on how to become a good seo in my site, I’m so blessed that I found all of those stuff I wanted to learn in your site. Great post man, very well said. God bless you always.

This is an awesome and all-inclusive post! I agree with Genvejen, starting off with a guide like that ensures that newbies pick up really quickly. The only thing that’s left for us is to rely on our time-tested experience and a baggage of mistakes we’ve made along the way Thanks again!

I really appreciate the post many of the links I knew about and have used but was surprized to find so many quality links that I had not seen before. I also hope to see you next month at the local New Haven Meeting.

This post is so inspiring. I want to develop a SEO service myself! Great work putting together the post Sean. I love what you said in the beginning of the article and it’s essentially the same thing Timothy Ferris said in the 4HWW and it would be that if you know more about a topic than someone else than you are an expert to them. Keep up the excellent work Sean!

Hi,
this is a great article, with alot of information in it. I have been playing with websites for about 8 weeks now, and love learning new info

However I keep reading this type of post about “Just in the last 15 minutes I’ve seen another $1,000+ sale roll in from a site that’s ranked #9 ” Niche sites. I would love to see a couple examples of these niche Sites, just to make sure I am on the right track with what I am doing.

Dude… Awesome Information here. I’m so glad I came across your website!

I’ve had the same goal that you have in mind for years to create an income from home and travel the world. I’ve finally found my niche and taken it online just a few months ago. I’m right on the verge of making my first money online and taking my game to the next level. I really love the whole idea behind your website and the message that you’re spreading.

I would love to connect with you in the future to do some awesome things! I’m looking forward to going through your site and picking up some more useful tips!